In the example below, lyric space is at a premium, and I need to make the elision mark a little more compact.
Is there a way to do this? I search for it in the Music Symbol editor, but I couldn’t find anything.
In the example below, lyric space is at a premium, and I need to make the elision mark a little more compact.
Is there a way to do this? I search for it in the Music Symbol editor, but I couldn’t find anything.
If I remember correctly we’re actually drawing elision slurs using actual slurs, and I don’t think we have any options for them at the moment. I’ll make a note that we might add some in future.
Thanks Daniel.
You could use a narrow space (see Unicode spaces) to separate the words (a Hair Space will give ‘the o’) and then use or misuse another symbol as Shift-X text to indicate the liaison. The Undertie ‿ (U+203F) is the usual symbol for this but you could use something as narrow as a Breve ˘ (U+02D8) if necessary.
Obviously this isn’t ideal though and life would be easier if one could edit the tracking.
Thanks, I’ll try that!
I was sure this option has been added, but I can’t find it. Search returned nothing. Is it possible to compress these now?
Oh, duh. It was staring me right in the face. Thanks.
One thing I hope we will one day be able to do is add the elision symbol underneath a non-breaking syllable or in the middle of a word. There are times when that is needed too. A lot of old English hymn texts from the 1700’s have aggressively contracted words, or require single-syllabification (powers vs. pow-ers) Indicating such instances with an elision underneath is useful in some cases. (And yes, in this case, it could be pow’rs, but I can’t think of a different example at the moment.)
Now that we have the Edit Single Lyric feature, it is already possible to add the elision symbol in the middle of a word:
The undertie (U+203F) was put in the middle of the word powers, and the lyric was edited using a combination of letter spacing, font stretch and baseline shift.
For all that effort I’m just better off dragging a little curve out by hand in affinity publisher!
But I’m grateful you’ve proved it’s possible, although it’s kludgy to be sure.
Easier: create a character style for those cases!
Why would you make it confusing for the amateur singer? pow’rs is correct.
Hot take: these sorts of forced contractions are ugly and only used when absolutely necessary.
I’m looking at you, ev’ry.
If I had a nickel for ev’ry time I had to…
I can tell you never lived through the Eighteenth century.
Guilty as charged!!
Again, why make it confusing for singers? They know how to sing pow’rs. In over 50 years of choral, music theater and opera directing, I don’t ever remember being asked about that. You would not want to hear my explanation to my choirs for that underscore nonsense in the middle of a word.
Your cleverness does not trump my need to keep it simple.
Mike, plenty of old editions do this, requiring exact duplication if that’s the nature of the job, so that’s a bit of a non sequiter.
And as I said above, that was just one word that came to mind at the time. There are other words that are less straightforward and do not have nearly as established a tradition of contraction as “pow’rs” (which is very common in English hymnody).